Spotlight

“We initially engaged Essextec solely for their experience in datacenter moves. As the process unfolded, they really impressed us with their knowledge of information management, virtualization, and disaster recovery. Essextec showed us how to reduce our data and back it up in one-tenth the time, and bulletproof our DR plan.” – Greg Meyer, Senior Technology Manager, The Provident Bank of New Jersey

“The team at Essextec really knew their stuff. While we were focused on server reduction, they simplified our environment, lowered our infrastructure and facility costs, and delivered a much more capable and available organization. Their experience brought efficiencies we hadn’t even thought of.” – Jack Novielli, CIO, The Provident Bank of New Jersey

Overview

Operating since 1839, The Provident Bank of New Jersey serves its customers through an extensive network of more than 80 branches throughout the state, in addition to online and telephone banking systems. Several acquisitions over the past decade created the need for an increase in IT operations, new integration requirements, and better capability of their overall IT environment. The bank has a strong commitment to meet changing customer needs, while delivering a high level of customer service.

Challenge

In addition to multiple acquisitions, an aging server environment created inefficiencies with information management, server sprawl, security, backup and recovery, and TestDev and disaster recovery (DR). With more than 60 servers, three data centers, a tape library, and an EMC SAN for its business-critical applications, Provident Bank was experiencing significant waste in space, resources, and costs; backups that exceeded the current backup window, an outdated business-continuity design, and unattainable RTOs also presented a threat to the bank’s operations. As a result, IT management knew that consolidation of their data centers was necessary to enable expansion plans and to save on operational costs. Once initial collaboration with Essextec began, Provident realized they needed a new IT strategy in order to successfully achieve business goals keep the bank’s systems running efficiently and securely.

Solution

Essextec consolidated the bank’s three data centers into one and moved it to a location that could accommodate future growth. The new location allows for better space utilization, more efficiency and heightened security. Our Solutions Architects used VMware vSphere to reduce 60 wintel servers to four IBM System x servers; in addition, they replaced Provident’s expensive and outdated EMC SAN with two efficient CommVault Simpana 9 SANs, implemented a virtual backup process, and added deduplication. This comprehensive solution enabled Provident to perform daily backups and create a TestDev environment. The entire collaborative process resulted in solutions that successfully align IT strategies to Provident’s core business objectives.

Results

Provident Bank’s new data center has increased capacity, performance, and availability—all on a smaller footprint. Business information is more secure, available, and recoverable. Backup, recovery, and DR is now fully automated. Backups consume 62% less time, are 40% more efficient, and have an RTO that’s improved by 92%. Resources have also been redeployed from administrative to productive tasks—significantly reducing power, cooling, and administrative costs.